In Search of Self: Wandering in the British Novel, 1860 to 1910.

Abstract

In Search of Self identifies how problems of getting around in increasingly complicated and changing spaces from 1860 to 1910 in London were taken up by the English novel. Parallel epistemological questions in this period frequently turned established orientations into failure. The adaptability of wandering made it a particularly useful model for maintaining an ongoing and mutable relationship between person and place . The dissertation moves from the local and accurate representations of London toward broader geographies and more fantastic spaces, tracing how the process of wandering reforms in each and serves as an adaptive means of self- exploration and growth.

Chapter one theorizes that the wandering body forms the intersection of physical and psychological orientation, drawing upon the work of Sara Ahmed and Andrew H. Miller. Phenomenological and psychological orientation unite to deploy wandering as an exploratory method of personal growth, as evidenced by Arnold Haultain’s 1914 philosophy of walking. Chapter two establishes a baseline of texts and maps that provided practical orientation, codifying an image London as the imperial metropole. This chapter juxtaposes these with texts that co-opt the tour as a narrative structure, scrutinizing its role in shaping British citizenry. Chapter three argues that Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend depicts a city in which bodies, body parts, spaces, and partnerships emerge as integral parts of character development. Self- fashioning is never finished, characters and spaces never whole. Chapter four studies Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, juxtaposing a firmly embodied roving with problems of shipwreck and drift, which are spread over a wider global setting. These movements are reflected in the novel’s larger epistemic struggle between fate and free will. Chapter five situates J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy within the larger Peter Pan body of works, focusing on the Neverlands as a space of ever- changing geography that responds to the minds and desires of its inhabitants. The Neverlands are thus the opposite of the guidebooks in chapter two; they are a space formed by the subjectivity rather than a representation of space affecting subjectivity.